Bottled Water's Clean Image Hides a Dirty Reality

Americans spend $16 billion a year on bottled water. We're happy to pay several times the cost of gasoline for something we could get for free, and people who gape with horror at Hummers think nothing of their Evian or Fiji Water -- but the environmental costs of this habit are high.

Fast Company takes a cold, clear look at how bottled water gets to our picnics and yoga studios and business meetings, and it's not pretty:

We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.)

When the water discussed doesn't come from nearby, like Poland Springs from my native Maine, but from Fiji or France, even more fuel is needed to ship it. And shipping aside, there's the problem of purifying and packing the water in the first place:

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji
Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24
hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity--something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from "one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth," as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze.

Defenders of the industry say it's better for us to drink water than soft drinks, and that the energy costs of our water habit would simply be displaced to making more cola if we decided to quit. There's a certain blind logic to that -- but it makes a lot more sense to just buy a filter for your tap and a bottle you can use again and again.

Related Wired coverage here.

Message in a Bottle [Fast Company]
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Image: Nick*